Imagine you are going about your day carrying 20 kg upon your shoulders every single day. It would only be comfortable for the first few minutes, the rest of the time you wouldn’t be able to carry so much weight. Eventually, you would have to drop it down. Just like that, we carry so much weight in our heads of past and future and it gets difficult for us to carry that weight but still, we don’t drop it because it looks natural and justified. Living in the moment can change that.
More than that everyone around us carries that weight so conveniently that we take it as a part of life. Even if we have just ONE PROBLEM in our entire life, we secretly don’t want to get rid of it. We don’t want to know how to start living in the moment. It looks hard, trust me carrying the weight is even worst.
Osho says living in the moment is an art. A good way to indulge in this Art is to trust life and say yes to its flow. If you keep fighting with life, how can you live in the moment?
The problem arises only when we project something as it is not. If A is big, we want it to be small, if A is loud, we want it to be gentle, if A is poor, we want it to be rich, if A is ugly, we want it to be smart, if A is fat, we want it to be slim. There is always some struggle going on which promises to bring satisfaction later. But if you closely observe your life, even in the past when A achieved a milestone, it soon started to hunt for the next. Because the very base of our human mind is dissatisfactory.
There is a Zen saying – “Just Tree.”
It means looking at a tree just as a tree, but once we add up a personal narrative (the projection of our human mind) it becomes a big tree, strong tree, brown tree, dry tree, broken tree, etc. Though it doesn’t die or change without the personal narrative; it stays as it was. Are we brave enough to look at a situation as it is without adding a personal narrative?
Our past is a dream because we can’t go back and touch it. We can visit the same place; we can meet the same people, but we can’t go back in time. Similarly, we can’t go to the future, it just lives in our imagination. The future always comes in the present moment. Other species like birds, animals, insects, etc. except humans know of the time as NOW, they don’t live by the biological clock. For them, everything is living in the moment.
Quieten the noise in your head.
Michael Singer says when we remove the rocks from the river, the river moves back to its original form. If our mind is causing noise, it’s also a hurdle between our original self and life. When we remove these “Little I” or “Personal I” rocks we get as good as a river, formless and ever flowing. And then all weathers are good, all seasons are welcomed.
People ask, “How to stop our mind?”. We can’t stop the noise instantaneously. If we try hard, we let that very thing have more control over us. Have you tried to stop an angry man? We can’t stop him from being angry. No. The only way to stop your mind is to pay less attention to its affairs. You can try it now by taking your attention elsewhere in your body other than your mind.
All our life we have been eating junk but when we see ourselves as shapeless, we go back to the healthy stuff. We can’t stop eating junk without focusing on eating healthy. It is the same with our minds. What we are doing here is to take a break from mind-made junk and take some organic breath into our system while living in the moment.
Listen to the least.
Listen to the swirly wind, listen to the sound of a machine, listen to every sound around you. Don’t discriminate. See what it is trying to say. Sit under a tree and observe what sounds you hear. Sit in the car and listen, sit in your room and listen. Listen to how these sounds are speaking to you every moment. You are living with these sounds every moment of your day.
Let’s do one experiment, close your eyes right now and get comfortable with all the sounds and the noises around you. Be okay around them. Now try and go to the farthest sound, take your ears as wide as you can and travel from your room to outside to the entire planet. Hear how all the sounds turn and merge into one big “whoooooop” sound.
Go above the earth and listen. After a while come back to yourself, and listen to the sound inside your body. You can also try closing your earlids and try to hear your heartbeat, the sound of your internal organs, and the sound of the emptiness inside your body.
Change your settings
If you work 12- 16 hours per day or follow a fixed routine, you will soon start feeling exhausted. You will feel like life is such a pain. Our brain can only work well if we utilize it optimally. Every night when we sleep many forces repair our body and mind. Taking your body, mind, and soul to a place where you feel the exactly sleep-like relaxed state is where the mind heals.
One definite treat that can refresh your body, mind & soul is nature. You can also change your setting by sitting on your bed quietly without any distractions for 10 mins. It is by giving yourself a non-doing hour every day. You don’t need to go to Switzerland to change your setting because once you are back you will have the same old syndrome and your mind will start racing again. It doesn’t matter where you go, what you do matters but how you do it matters the most.
You can simply change your setting by sitting on your bed quietly without any distractions for 10 minutes per day. It is by giving yourself non-doing time every day. Buddha talks a lot about breathing practices like Aana Panna, Vipassana, etc. Travel with your breath to the sacred panel of the heart where there is peace, calmness, love, and joy.
Voo Experiment
Dr. Peter Levive in an interview shared “One simple but especially powerful tool for helping the person interrupt this gut distress is something I call the Voo Exercise. You take a deep, full, easy breath, and on the exhalation, make the sustained sound “vooooo,” directing the vibration to your gut. Once you let the air all the way out, you just allow the next breath to come in, spontaneously filling the belly and chest.”
He further added- There’s a Sufi saying: “The body is the shore of the ocean of being.” Learning how to tune into the subtle shifts that are going on inside us all the time can open us to the experience of wholeness and what I call the Authentic Self.
Watch the video on Youtube to know exactly how to do it – A Simple Exercise to Ease Despair with Peter Levine, PhD – YouTube
There is more to it. If you want to start living in the moment, I suggest reading the book “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. I picked it up when I was 21 years old.
Some practices that helped me a lot during my shitty mind days:
Start and stop. Play a game with your thoughts, say stop, and hold your thoughts until you say start again.
Take a gap. No matter what you are doing take a minute pause, in escalators, car, kitchen, office, and other places.
The humming sound of the A/C or Fan. Always be keen to observe the background sound. Don’t give all of your attention to the foreground.
I have also designed 21 Days Presence Practice Course that will help you with many tools for living in the moment. Please check it out here.
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